T-Bird Anni Rides Again

I vow I will never, ever buy an oddball car ever again in my life.  Don’t get me wrong, I love my momo, its (usually) reliable, it’s economical to drive, it has ABS, powered steering, air con and windows that go up and down at the touch of a button.  it’s also a total oddball, nothing else shares a part with it.  Which is why I still don’t have an exhaust.  You see, as they were removing the exhaust to put the new one on, one of the bits that connects the exhaust to the car’s central nervous system crumbed to rust. No one keeps these in stock but they can get one for tomorrow lunch so they gently reunited the crumbing wreck of the old exhaust with the car and told me to drive carefully adn to expect it to stall a lot.  Funny you know, but I’ve been stalling loads recently and put it down to me just losing the plot but it seems it’s the car after all!

There has been garden ed going on in spade-loads today.  I think I need to organise some sort of gazebo thing for inclement weather so we can still be outside during typical British weather as well as the rest of the time.  I read chapter after chapter of Roman Mystery to her.  We have finished the first one adn just started the second.  They are still enthralling both of us and my neighbour wanted to know what I was reading as she thought her lads might like it for bedtime stories too!  I keep catching hints of where the BBC version has got it’s storylines from but the books are oh so much better (gosh, now there’s a surprise…. nah!)  It spun off into discussions on different customs, the value of historic fiction, the slave trade, national traits and how actually those sorts of sweeping statements are rarely true kicked off by her asking "Are Romans bad or good mummy?" because of course, these stories have nice, friendly Romans in but the ones in Our Island Story were the naughty invading kind of Romans   then "What about Jews?" because one of the families in the story are Jewish and there are hints of Romans not liking Jews (thanks to Nero blaming them for burning down Rome)

She’s also read for me fairly well.  I’ve abandoned the phonics books for a bit as they are just getting too hard for her and she’s losing all her confidence again.  So we are doing ORT level 4 and Reading A-Z level B which are all well within her ability thanks to huge picture clues, loads of repetitive text adn mainly simple words.  It’s nice not be be battling for every word, especially when she stopped being able to read "easy" words because they followed on from ones that were "hard" so she’d given up.

I’m sure there was some other stuff too but I have a stinking headache thanks to sitting out in the sun without my hat on so I’m off for a very cool shower followed by a very early night in the hopes of sleeping it off.